![]() Women with financial means had some, albeit very limited, recourse to a legal abortion less affluent women, who disproportionately were young and members of minority groups, had few options aside from a dangerous illegal procedure. At best, these choices could be demeaning and humiliating, and at worst, they could lead to injury and death. While the problem of unintended pregnancy spanned all strata of society, the choices available to women varied before Roe. In the 1960s, researchers from Princeton University estimated that almost one in three Americans (32%) who wanted no more children were likely to have at least one unintended pregnancy before the end of their childbearing years more than six in 10 Americans (62%) wanting children at some point in the future were likely to have experienced at least one unintended pregnancy. In the 1960s, states began reforming their strict antiabortion laws, so that when the Supreme Court made abortion legal nationwide, legal abortions were already available in 17 states under a range of circumstances beyond those necessary to save a woman's life ( see box).īut regardless of the legal status of abortion, its fundamental underlying cause-unintended pregnancy-has been a continuing reality for American women. Generally permitted at the nation's founding and for several decades thereafter, the procedure was made illegal under most circumstances in most states beginning in the mid-1800s. Indeed, the legal status of abortion has passed through several distinct phases in American history. ![]() Abortion, both legal and illegal, had long been part of life in America. The Supreme Court did not "invent" legal abortion, much less abortion itself, when it handed down its historic Roe v. Although the world may not be the same as it was three decades ago, Roe's reversal would likely herald the return to a two-tier system in which safe abortion was available to some Americans but out of reach of many in need. The toll the nation's abortion laws took on women's lives and health in the years before Roe was substantial. Wade and a Supreme Court whose composition is considered likely to change in the near future, it is instructive to look back at the choices available-and not available-to women before abortion was made legal nationwide. ![]() With an administration deeply opposed to abortion, a Congress poised to pass legislation aimed at weakening the principles underlying Roe v. ![]()
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